Anatomy of the New Testament

Seventh Edition

Robert A. Spivey, D. Moody Smith, C. Clifton Black

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780800699710
• eBook ISBN: 9781451452396
• Edition: 7
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

This broadly adopted textbook weds literary and historical approaches to focus on the New Testament's structure and meaning. Anatomy of the New Testament is systematic, critical, and reliable in its scope and content.

This seventh edition has been revised throughout, to take account of current trends in scholarship and to discuss important interpretative issues, such as the Gospel of Thomas. Each chapter includes two new features: Have You Learned It? offering questions for analysis and synthesis; What Do They Mean? presenting definitions of key terms to enhance student comprehension and critical thinking.

Chapter 1

The World of the New Testament

Image 6: This scene from the Arch of Titus in the Roman Forum celebrates the Emperor Titus’s capture of Jerusalem in a.d. 70. The victorious Romans triumphantly bear the sacred objects of the Jerusalem temple, including the menorah, or seven-branched lampstand, symbolizing the presence of God. (Image by users Tetraktys, Steerpike, and Yonidebest, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.)

One cannot understand the New Testament without a working knowledge of the culture from which it arose. Students who ignore this chapter do so at their peril.

The Jewish World

A History of Tragedy and Renewal

A Persistent Obedience

The Pharisees

The Sadducees

The Essenes

An Abiding Hope

The Greco-Roman World

Language and Culture

Alexander the Great

The Greek Language

Life under the Roman Empire

Roman Peace

Communication

Civic Life

Domestic Life

Religion

Traditional and Official Religion

Popular Religion

Mystery Religions

Gnosticism

From Philosophy to Astrology

Diaspora Judaism

The Jewish World

Jesus was a Jew. So were his first disciples. To call Jesus Christ is to identify him with Israel’s Messiah, the anointed king of Davidic lineage (cf. 2 Sam. 7:12-15 and Ps. 89:3-4). The earliest Christians did not consider themselves members of a new religion separate from Judaism. Yet Jesus and his disciples represented something new within Judaism. This novelty consisted not in original or unique ideas but in the aspects of ancient traditions and hopes that were taken up, reinterpreted, and emphasized.

No new movement can be understood apart from its historical antecedents and the factors that helped to produce it. The historical setting of Jesus, early Christianity, and the New Testament was first-century Judaism. A remarkable continuity or similarity exists between the Judaism of today and that of the first century, despite the changes that succeeding centuries have wrought. This continuity is in itself a clue to the character of that ancient faith.

Both Judaism and Christianity are historical religions, and it belongs to the nature of both to emphasize continuity. They share a faith in a God who deals with human beings, individually and collectively, in such a way that God’s will can be discerned in history. Crucial to both religions is the idea that God reveals or has been revealed in historical events. The holy scriptures of both religions are largely narratives of the past: legends, sagas, and historical accounts. Broadly speaking, they are testimonies to God’s historical revelations. The Hebrew Bible (the Christian Old Testament) is a vast collection of legal, cultic, devotional, and narrative material set in a historical framework. It is the literary product of nearly a thousand years of Israel’s history. Although the New Testament is much briefer and covers a much shorter period of time, it too tells of people and events in the conviction that God has wrought wondrous deeds in history that are of utmost importance for the future of humanity. Consciously and deliberately, the New Testament writers take up the story of the Old Testament and bring it to a culmination. That culmination, naturally, is distinctly Christian, rather than generally Jewish.

The limits of the Hebrew Bible had not been officially defined in the time of Jesus and earliest Christianity. Yet, according to the New Testament, Jesus himself speaks of “the law and the prophets” (Matt. 5:17) and quotes from the Psalms (Mark 15:34; cf. Ps. 22:1). Thus he seems to have known the threefold division of sacred scripture—law, prophets, and writings (cf. Luke 24:44)—that is reflected generally in the New Testament. According to tradition, the rabbis fixed the canon of the Hebrew Bible at the Council of Jamnia around a.d. 90, although the main lines had been established much earlier. Most Protestant churches accept this Hebrew canon. Other, mostly Catholic, churches accept as canonical the apocryphal or deuterocanonical books contained in the Septuagint.

Judaism was a religion of revelation, history, and a book. As such, it was a religion steeped in tradition: a tradition by which Israel identified and understood itself as a distinct and chosen people, the people of the Lord. Moreover, much of the literature of the Old Testament and the written and oral traditions that developed from it were understood as divine directions intended to regulate Israel’s response to the Lord’s goodness. The most influential law code the Western world has known, the Ten Commandments, begins: “I am the lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me” (Exod. 20:2-3; Deut. 5:6-7). The statement of what God has done leads to a statement of what the people ought to do in response: the basic structure of Old Testament law. A principal activity of many Jewish religious leaders in Jesus’ day was the interpretation and fulfillment of that law.

Revelation and history, tradition and law, although immensely important, were not the whole of Judaism. A part of obedience to the law was the performance of worship worthy of God. The center of this worship in the time of Jesus was the temple in Jerusalem. The heart of the temple was the sacrificial altar, where priests offered sacrifice to God. Until its destruction by the Romans in a.d. 70, the temple served as the focal point of Jewish worship. Its importance to the life of first-century Judaism can scarcely be overestimated. Not only was the temple regarded as the center of the universe and the place where the last days were to be consummated; it also served as a means for structuring time, both through daily sacrifices and seasonal festivals. Any violation of the temple by the Roman authorities or others was sufficient to cause a major Jewish revolt. Further, the Jewish sect of Qumran originated in reaction to what its members considered the corruption of temple worship. Later, Jesus was accused of trying to destroy this sacred institution of Jewish piety (Mark 14:58 par.).

The other major Jewish religious institution was the synagogue. There was but one Jerusalem temple, but there were many synagogues. Even in Palestine, but especially in the Diaspora, the synagogue became for most Jews the practical center of their religious life. Although the synagogue’s origin is hidden in obscurity, by the first century it had become a central Jewish institution: a kind of community center for study of the Jewish law and regular weekly worship, including reading and commentary on the Torah and prayers for the congregation. Unlike the temple, over which priests presided, the synagogue was a lay organization that allowed broader participation, such as Jesus’ reading from the Torah in the synagogue (Luke 4:16) and Paul’s extensive use of synagogues in his missionary work (Acts 18:4).

Another factor played a large role in first-century Judaism: the land. The small piece of territory at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea—variously called the Holy Land, Palestine, or Israel—has been the occasion and cause of Jewish hope and frustration for three thousand years. At least from the days of the Davidic monarchy, the land was regarded as God’s promise and gift to his people. The promise reached back into the days of the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who dwelt in and around the land but did not possess it (see Gen. 12:1-3). Yet Israel believed that God had promised the land to her, and in this faith she occupied and defended it. Israel, however, could never rest easy in the land: subject to frequent threat and attack, she was secure only when more powerful, surrounding nations were momentarily weak or looking in other directions. In the late eighth century b.c., the territories of all the Israelite tribes except Judah were overrun by the Assyrians; less than a century and a half later, the Babylonians invaded Judea, laid siege to Jerusalem, and overthrew it. The Davidic kingship came to an end, and many of the people were deported into Babylonian captivity.

Image 7: Altar in Ephesus with a scene of sacrifice. (From Cities of Paul by Helmut Koester, copyright © 2005 the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved. Used here by permission of Fortress Press [www.fortresspress.com].)

The subsequent history of the land has been a troubled one. The modern state of Israel (created in 1948) represents the first instance of Jewish control of the land since shortly before the time of Jesus. Since the Babylonian exile, the land of Israel has been ruled by other peoples, whether Persians, Romans, or British. The question of the land’s possession and governance was quite as important in Jesus’ day as it is today, for the land was then occupied by the Romans and ruled by puppet-kings and imperial procurators. The hope for the restoration of Jewish dominion under Davidic kingship was an important aspect of the background of Jesus’ ministry.

A History of Tragedy and Renewal

How would early Christianity have been affected if the Jewish and Greco-Roman worlds had never collided?

From the Babylonian conquest of Judea in 587 b.c. to the time of Jesus’ death, the Jews in Palestine lived mostly under foreign domination, relieved only by a century or so of relative ind...

Table of contents

• PREFACE
• Prologue: The Nature of the New Testament
• 1 The World of the New Testament
• PART ONE The Gospels And Jesus
• 2 Mark: The Gospel of Suffering
• 3 Matthew: The Gospel of Obedience
• 4 Luke: The Gospel of Witnessing
• 5 John: The Gospel of Jesus’ Glory
• 6 Jesus the Messiah
• PART TWO The Apostles and The Early Church
• 7 Acts: Mission and Witness
• 8 Paul: Apostle to the Gentiles
• 9 1 Corinthians: Faith for a Fractured Church
• 10 Romans: The Righteousness of God
• 11 Deutero-Pauline Letters: The Emerging Church
• 12 The Catholic Epistles: Faith and Order
• 13 Other Apostolic Writings: Vision and Discipline